Hampton Grandmother Feels Called To Mission To Help Navajo Nation

September 20, 2009|By Prue Salasky, psalasky@dailypress.com -247-4784

In 2000, in a motel room in South Carolina while on a business trip, Becky Holland heard the call. "I wasn't looking for God," says the Hampton grandmother. The "supernatural" experience led her back to the church and eventually to becoming the evangelical leader of Pure Water Ministry. Founded in 2003, it's a nondenominational Christian ministry that runs missions to the Navajo Nation. Holland, 64, is a member of Cornerstone Fellowship Church in Hampton and works as an environmental specialist at Fort Monroe. She's currently studying for a bachelor's degree in Church Ministries at Bethel College in Hampton and hopes to graduate next year.

Holland dubs the ministry, with a dozen or so core members from different churches in the area, as reaching "From Fox Hill to the Four Corners." Fox Hill is the Hampton neighborhood where most of the volunteers reside, and Four Corners describes the area where four states - Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah - meet. That is where the Navajo reservation, with a population of around 250,000, occupies 27,000 square miles in three states. The ministry partners with Four Corners Native American Ministry in Shiprock, N.M., a Navajo cooperative parish of New Mexico affiliated with the United Methodist Church.

Pure Water's next mission isn't until May to attend "Fire on the Res," a huge youth revival event in Utah, but several members make individual visits to the reservation year round and the next fundraiser is a women's workshop on Oct. 3.

On her first visit to Shiprock, Holland helped with building projects. She was frustrated by the experience. "There was a void inside me," she says. "God called me to the ministry not to do construction work." So, at the invitation of the resident pastor she spent three weeks there by herself. And in due course, in 2003, Pure Water was born to serve the Navajo people. "When you answer the call, when you're obedient to God's word, everything is provided," she says. "It's been a faith walk." Family and friends may not understand, but the group's board members do. In particular she credits Jean and Michael Melson, the chairman, with "making things happen," including conjuring supplies for 150 schoolchildren.

Poverty, alcoholism, unemployment and lack of water constitute major issues for Navajo residents of the reservation.

"It's just so humbling. Sometimes I think all our stuff drags us down. The more I know, the more I want to do," says Carlene Savedge, 64, a member of Fox Hill United Methodist Church, who has been on two missions and who will be a guest speaker at the upcoming workshop. She lost her husband to cancer in June and will talk on "Facing the World Through Adversity." "I've felt led to bring peace to women in rough times," she says. "Biblical principles have been my rock."

Savedge, who has Cherokee ancestry, recounts how a girl on the reservation cried when they brought new, rather than used, Sunday School materials; how she took the wife of a World War II code talker to visit him in a nursing home; and how they all prayed together for victims of the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007.

Last year Savedge returned with Jean Melson. Though initially sceptical of the concept, dismissing it as an act for TV, Savedge says, "We both got slain in the spirit out there." She counters the charge of "putting a Band-Aid on a heart attack" with regard to the overwhelming needs by saying "you do it just one person at a time. You find out what the real needs are and brighten the corner where you are. That's how I look at it. The Bible calls some to stay and some to go."

Holland estimates that between 5 and 7 percent of those on the reservation are Christians. "We fix and paint but we have to tell them about Jesus. We're farmers. We plant the seed of the gospel," she says. Pure Water also gives out food supplies. The Navajo diet, she says, consists largely of fried bread, potatoes and coffee. The group gives out a "sheepherder's special," a bag of flour, baking soda, salt and coffee, supplies for a week.

Holland spent six weeks at Shiprock this summer, conducting Bible study classes and hours-long revivals. "Church is an all-day event. They don't want the 20-minute preachers," she says. There's nothing out there, and families may walk for miles to attend, or pile into trucks and then have to collect money for gas in order to get home, she adds. She also gave out MP3 players with the New Testament in the Navajo language and distributed baseball equipment for after-church games supplied by Liberty Baptist Church in Hampton.

"They're so grateful about the little things we take for granted. They're not cluttered, their lives are very simple. 'Give us this day our daily bread.' There's a place out there for it," says Holland.

NEWS TO USE

What: Women's Workshop, "Facing the World - while Keeping Your Faith," presented by Pure Water Ministry; guest speakers are Carlene Savedge, Shannon Waldroup and Gloristine Evins; music by Isabel Tripp